GODFREY REHAAG was born in North London in 1948. On leaving school, he tried careers in banking and engineering, but by the age of twenty, he found accountancy, and its allure lasted all his working life. By 24, he had qualified as a Chartered Accountant and then as a Chartered Tax Adviser. He spent some time working in commerce and industry, eventually becoming the personal assistant to the joint chairman/chief executive of a public group of companies in the City of London. At last he now had the resources to fulfill his dream of going to university; while still a director of two companies, he took up studies at the University of Kent and a year later was awarded a Master's Degree in Accountancy, with principal options in project evaluation and commercial law.
In 1974, Godfrey moved to the West Country and, starting from nothing, founded his own professional practice as a Chartered Accountant. He built this up for about 16 years, offering the full range of general practice services. He provided financial, auditing, taxation and investment advice, both corporate and private, and management consultancy. He served as the accountant and business adviser to many hundreds of business enterprises, from the one-man-band to ventures involving many millions of pounds. Having married Jane in 1980, he wanted to spend more time with his growing family, doing more and more work from home. In 1990 he retired as senior partner of the firm he had founded in order to work entirely from home on writing and research, and to concentrate on providing a high level of service to a handful of established clients.
Never just a remote adviser, Godfrey has been in business himself as a participator in several commercial ventures, one of which attracted the favourable attention of the national press. Over the years he has held numerous appointments as a company director or company secretary, in fields as diverse as property construction, frozen food, food manufacturing, theatre and arts centre, TV rental, industrial technology, biotechnology and international oil-spill recovery. He has also been appointed as receiver and manager and as liquidator of many companies, and is an experienced forensic accountant, having appeared as an expert witness in several trials. He was elected a member of the Academy of Experts, and was on the Law Society’s ‘checked’ list for several years.
Godfrey has been the treasurer or council member of innumerable charities, including a national learned society, The Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom. He was listed in the inaugural edition of Debrett's Distinguished People of Today. For over twenty years he was the financial adviser to James Lovelock, the celebrated environmental scientist and founder of the international 'Gaia' movement.
Part of Godfrey’s time over the last few years was devoted to research into the whole subject of how human beings do business with each other, and he is the author of a book on corporate economics which challenged conventional thinking on this subject, The Limited Company: replacing the victorian steam engine (published by Ashgate, 1994). This was published as a research monograph, and received excellent reviews from several leading commentators for the quality of its philosophical analysis.
He has been a member of British Mensa for over thirty years, and has served the community through both Round Table and the Rotary Club. In 2006, Godfrey and his wife Jane bought and refurbished a contemporary art gallery in the heart of old St Ives, in Cornwall. They ran this together very successfully until the end of 2009. At the same time, Godfrey served as trustee and treasurer of both the Bernard Leach Pottery and the St Ives School of Painting.
In December 2009, Jane and Godfrey retired fully and moved to Dorset to be nearer their four children and one grandchild.